Nah, AWS provides logistics to military and intelligence and has for quite a while.

It's tough to argue, "these aren't military targets, we just rent the equipment and provide services to the military for hundreds of billions of dollars."

Which is probably what people will argue.

To what are you alluding?

Do they only have to state a reason or does somebody have to adjudicate whether that reason is validly "justified"? We have a Public Utilities Commission here that pretends to do such things.

Or is this one of these, "you can't know, so try it and a judge will tell you what the law was" sort of things?

Maybe somebody who understands Italian jurisprudence can clarify their theory of law.

Agreed.

Also Major Tom shouldn't try to fix anything on a spacecraft if it's somebody else's job.

I don't want to say I heard Mission Control on NASA TV reading down a procedure to tell an ISS commander how to tie his shoes but it felt like that.

Velcro, I guess.

Most helpful comment of the week.

Much kudos.

Yes, and they didn't notice that the lab tests were all done with plastic gloves.

I don't know, I went back to CPAN after I came to understand the socioeconomic and cultural ramifications of mandatory white space.

Papers, please?

"They yearn for the greenscreens."

Basically everyone who lives in the area or studies the climate or hydrology would tell you that you're insane.

More like a once-in-a-millennium event. Though I suspect it's going to be considerably more common going forward.

Deserts have some amount of normal precipitation, too. And when you get a lot less than normal, that's called a drought. Yes, even in a desert.

We do have pretty good data from tree rings. Unless you think the trees came from somewhere else?

Even worse is when they compromise the VPN operators and then monitor your usage until you do something that makes them decide to crack down on you.

People erroneously think of VPNs as privacy protectors. They aren't, not unless you have very good reason to trust whoever is running the server. If you don't, then they're concentrators for likely subversive traffic and its origins.

The solution to this is to join a party and get involved in the decisionmaking. It's a lot easier than you might think, and you can have a lot more influence that you might expect, precisely because not that many people do this.

I expect that it'll go towards U+2E3A and U+2E3B rather than U+2013.

Meh.

It would undoubtedly be very expensive at first, and therefore only available to the very wealth (probably not ultra-wealthy -- even without automation, caring for such a clone wouldn't be a full-time job, so call it maybe $30k/year -- within the reach of the upper middle class). But competition would drive automation, and we already have most of the techniques required, having developed them to deal with coma patients and the like, but at lower cost because this case would be dealing with a fundamentally healthy body. My guess based on some napkin math is that cost could be driven down as low as $10k per year. Maybe lower.

$10k per year is expensive, sure, but having an immunologically-perfect organ donor could absolutely be worth it for someone making as little as $200k per year.

If the cost could be driven down to $5k per year... then it's in the range where most middle-class Americans could afford it, even if it meant that they'd have to cut back a little somewhere else; maybe drive an older car rather than leasing a new one, or similar.

You're confusing the importance of avoiding Kessler syndrome in LEO with the difficulty of causing Kessler syndrome. GEO debris can potentially remain there for millions of years before interactions between the gravitational pull of the Sun, Earth, and Moon sufficiently perturb it. LEO debris remains for weeks to months. You have to have many orders of magnitude more debris in LEO to trigger Kessler Syndrome, where the rate of collisions exceeds the rate of debris loss.

The fact that a LEO Kessler Syndrome would also be short is something that exists on top of that.

It's also worth nothing that not only are modern satellites not only vastly better at properly disposing of themselves than they were in the 1970s when Kessler Syndrome was proposed, but they're also vastly better at avoiding debris strikes. All of these factors are multiplicative together.

Immunology, presumably.

The only donor bodies that aren't going to treat the transplant as an act of war are clones or heavily immunosuppressed; and it's probably more plausible to assume that you'll be able to clone a human like a sheep than assume that you'll be making some fundamental breakthroughs in immunology to deal more elegantly with unmatched hosts.